Arts Heritage/History Outdoors

Literary Gardener: Our Mothers’ Gardens

Literary Gardener: Our Mothers’ Gardens

Stephanie Sipp, artist

By Carol Howard

In the 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the novelist and poet Alice Walker looks back through generations of African-American women in the era of slavery and Jim Crow, uncovering the few black women literary artists whose work had been preserved through history. Walker wonders that Phillis Wheatley, an 18th-century slave woman, was able to write and publish poems celebrating the liberty claimed by the American revolutionaries. She muses upon the remarkable artistic freedom asserted by Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, whose reputation Walker herself would rescue from obscurity.

What about the millions of other African-American women in history? Weren’t there artists among them as well? Walker begins to realize that her own mother was among these artists. A Georgia sharecropper and domestic worker who raised eight children and defied white landowners by insisting that her children stay in school, Walker’s mother was also a talented garden designer and horticulturist.

Walker remembers “a garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity,” that strangers would come to “walk among my mother’s art.” Indeed, “even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms,” writes Walker. She begins to redefine art to include gardens as forms of creativity not honored in museums, books or recordings.

As distinct from the real gardens of her past, the gardens of Walker’s literary imagination offer a means to open readers’ eyes to the history of racism. In the short story “The Flowers,” a girl leaves her sharecropping family’s cabin to frolic among silver ferns and wildflowers on a peaceful summer day. As she wanders through an unfamiliar cove, she is startled to find herself stepping on a man’s skeleton, next to which she spies a “wild pink rose.” As she picks the rose, she discovers among its roots a piece of rope. Her innocence is lost in the realization that the man had been a lynching victim. What makes the scene so arresting is that it unfolds against a landscape of restorative nature.

Readers may also catch moments of empowerment in Walker’s imagined gardens. In the poem “Revolutionary Petunias,” a “backwoods woman” on death row wants her survivors to remember to water her flowers. Having avenged her husband’s murder with a tool of her horticultural artistry—a cultivating hoe—what matters to her, as she faces death, is knowing her garden will live on.

The garden, though, is also a place of enduring beauty and friendship in Walker’s writings. In “Peonies,” she observes that this grand flower requires the help of the tiny ant, the “indispensable friend,” to bloom. With this poem, she celebrates the garden as a symbol of African- American women artists’ mutual inspiration.

The author of books of poetry, fiction and essays, Alice Walker published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose in 1983. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.

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